Voters in Providence, Rhode Island, showed a clear inclination toward enforceable rent controls.
A sizable portion of Democratic voters in Providence backed a bold approach to housing regulation by choosing state Rep. David Morales over the sitting Mayor Brett Smiley in the city’s primary on Wednesday.
Morales, affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (even though he did not receive the local DSA chapter’s endorsement in this race), ran on a left-leaning housing platform that urged a 4 percent annual rent cap and restrictions on corporate ownership of rental housing.
He secured 52.4 percent of the vote in the primary, enough to comfortably defeat Smiley, who had vetoed a council-approved rent-stabilization ordinance earlier in April.
Throughout the campaign, Smiley argued that the measure he vetoed—an ordinance to limit rent growth to 4 percent annually for multifamily buildings with five or more units that are at least 11 years old—would hinder the new construction needed to keep rents from rising.
Landlords would have been permitted to petition for increases of up to 10 percent to offset their rising costs.
“Rent control doesn’t lower anybody’s rent,” Smiley contended during an August debate. “There are people struggling today. The root cause of that is a shortage of housing.”
He pointed to Saint Paul, Minnesota, where a voter-approved rent-control ordinance led developers to abandon ongoing projects, as a warning sign of rent control gone awry.
Morales argued that rent control provided an immediate, necessary fix to surging rents.
In that August exchange, Morales maintained that the city council’s rent-control plan included exemptions meant to avert a decline in new construction.
His campaign site cites Portland, Maine, where housing construction rose soon after residents approved rent controls and raised the share of affordable housing that new developments must include, as evidence countering the Saint Paul scenario.
As I’ve noted previously, Portland’s brief post-2020 permitting surge largely involved projects exempt from the city’s new affordability rules. More recent reporting indicates that construction has since fallen sharply in Portland.
Even with the exemptions, Providence’s vetoed rent-control plan would have ranked among the nation’s strictest policies. By contrast, older rent-control schemes typically include a permanent exemption for new construction, and newer measures in California and Oregon grant a 15-year exemption for new projects.
The ordinance also did not authorize additional increases when a unit became vacant.
Supporters of rent control quickly presented Morales’ victory as evidence of voters embracing a more progressive branch of the Democratic Party.
“We’re witnessing voters across the country who want more than change—they want a concrete vision for the policies we’re fighting for,” said New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after the primary.
Mamdani may be right that Morales’ triumph signals a broader appetite among Democrats for a more socialist approach to housing policy.
That perspective should worry those who advocate for sustainable reductions in housing costs. Smiley is not a pure free-market advocate; he governed as a liberal mayor in a liberal city.
In the August debate, he highlighted that roughly one-fifth of Providence’s new units were deed-restricted as affordable housing. (As I’ve argued before, a high share of deed-restricted new units is typically a sign that regulation is constraining much of the development activity.)
Even that stance wasn’t persuasive enough to motivate Democratic primary voters. They chose Morales, the candidate who backs binding price controls.
If the city council and its new mayor succeed in enacting those price controls, the usual outcomes—slower new construction and deteriorating housing quality—are likely to follow.
